Savoy Brown leader Kim Simmonds turned 65 just four weeks ago. But he says retirement would surely give him the blues.

“No, I’m not going to stop working,” said Simmonds, who founded the long-lived blues-rock group during 1965 in London and brings the latest permutation of the band to town this weekend to headline the Magic Bag’s 19th Annual Anti-Freeze Blues Festival. “Doing this and getting on stage and playing is like an adrenalin shot for me, or what the athletes get … a steroid shot.

“You get on stage and it’s like the doctor gave you a steroid shot, yeah. You feel 20 years younger. That alone is enough to keep you going.”

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But Simmonds says he’s also driven by a continuing desire to not only play the old favorites from Savoy Brown’s catalog but also to create new music and find fresh musical adventures. The current version of the band, in fact, is one of those — a trio for the first time in the group’s nearly 48-year history.

“I try not to make it one of those bombastic blues trios or a power trio, though,” explains Simmonds, who has ridden herd over more than five dozen members of Savoy Brown, including the subsequent founders of Foghat. “I do a lot of acoustic stuff, and I try to make it as intellectual as I can.

“I mean, it’s very easy to turn it up to 10 and give people what they want and play with a lot of emotion. There’s just a lot more to me than that, and I think sometimes I don’t give that intellectual stuff enough showing. When you get on stage it’s time to reinvent, but without that core of work that you’ve done, I think you’d be worse off. So it’s a balance.”

Simmonds says he’s written “an album’s worth of material playing single-string acoustic guitar,” but his next Savoy Brown release, the follow-up to 2011’s “Voodoo Moon,” will be “a straight blues record” tentatively titled “Going to the Delta,” which he plans to record during January and February for release later this year.

“I think I’ve written some very, very good songs for this,” says the father of three, who resides in New York state. “With everyone grown up I’ve been able to concentrate over a number of years on the music again. Like everything else it takes years to see the benefits of that, but I’m certainly seeing them at the moment.

“And I’ve changed my guitar sound, cleaned it up a bit, to accommodate the new record. I’m kind of excited about keeping it fresh, really. People come along to the shows and come up to me and say, ‘You’re better than you used to be’ or this that and the other, which is a nice sort of backhanded compliment. I don’t think I’m any better or worse than I used to be in the ‘60s, but I try to keep it fresh so people can come along and get something new out of it.”